


Loosed from this Dream of Life

by hellkitty



Category: Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-14
Updated: 2012-11-14
Packaged: 2017-11-18 14:57:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/562303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wrote this little ficlet last night to ward off insomnia. :)  Copious purple prose.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Loosed from this Dream of Life

There are no shadows in the land of the dead.  

Primus had decreed that there should be no darkness, no separation whatsoever from one spark to the next. Even the land itself was not real: it had no weight or substance. It existed only by consensus, a held fond belief for ground and sky by those who no longer had need for either.  

There was no need for bodies, either, or forms beyond balls of coruscating light, as if they had transcended metal.  But many kept the shapes of their bodies, the familiar limbs and colors, those who stayed, those who had not Ascended utterly into the great Light around them, the substance of Primus himself.

Time moved strangely here, all at once and not at all, as time was a creation of limited minds, too small to grasp the totality of Primus. Time swirled and eddied, sometimes forward, sometimes back, like fond breezes kissing the immaterial cheeks of the dead.

The dead did not think of themselves as dead or lacking. There was no sorrow here, only eager awaiting, only freedom from suffering, freedom from despair, freedom from all the pettinesses that had hampered them in life. They thought of themselves as freed, but not free. The truly free were the Ascended, who no longer needed the familiar to feel their freedom.

In this gouache of light and color, those who had once been alive could feel each other, a resonant chord of color and sound and sensation, a physical song.  And songs sometimes harmonized, those who had been alive finding some similar chord or hue in each other, tracing that note or ray of light along its length, back to its source.

And thus it was, they stood—without standing—one white and red, blinding to look at even in this place of light, the other a quiet color of old shimmering gold, like velvet made light.

“You know him,” the white one said—though one didn’t speak here, the normal way, because speech was an act of need, and this was an offer to share. One simply formed a thought, created a bridge from light and texture, and cast it out, knowing it would find home.

“I do.”  The gold glow shifted, taking shape and the semblance of solidity. It twisted the light and substance around it, darkening it to the narrow alleys of a gutter, even as he held out a hand.

The white light shifted, rolling like a great, glowing pearl, before sliding over and into that translucent hand, and into the one who had been Gasket, when he had been one.

[***]

“Drift,” Gasket said, his hand curling over the other’s arm in a darkness so heavy it seemed to have weight. “Be careful.”

A shrug, trying to pull his arm free. “I can take care of myself.”

Gasket grinned, dentae glinting in the dimness. “I know you can, Drift.  But I can worry, can’t I?”

“Not worth worrying about.” The mouth turned, like an empty bowl. 

“You can say that all you want,” Gasket said, “as long as you don’t believe it.”

“Gasket.”

Gasket tilted his helm, looking up at Drift from under its rim, with a grin. 

Drift sighed, with a  showy roll of his optics. 

Gasket laughed.  “Say it.”

The mouth pinched. “Fine.  I don’t believe it.”

“Believe what.” Gasket poked him playfully in the chassis.

“Frag.” An uncomfortable squirm, the optics ducking away.

“Drift.”

Drift groaned. “I don’t believe I’m not worth worrying about,” he said, flatly. 

“Good,” Gasket teased. “We’ll work on sounding convincing next.”

“The frag you will.”

“The frag _we_ will,” Gasket corrected.

An electric moment between them, red optics meeting blue. “…should go. Wasting time.”  Drift ticked his head toward the doorway of the burned out shop they used as a squat.

Gasket hesitated, letting his hand slide off Drift’s arm, letting him go, if lingeringly. “Want me to come with you?”

Drift frowned, weighing the idea. He was on the verge of saying no, his mouthplate shaping the word, when he looked into Gasket’s optics once more. And in there, he saw some small, swirling sun of gold, a harbinger of the light he’d not yet seen.

[***]

In that place beyond place and outside of time, the lights separated, again, dancing together to a silent melody. They had been joined in memory, in life, they had arabesqued through time and space and memory and reality, across a dozen different barriers that were no barriers to those who had given up the dream of life. They leapt, and chased each other, playful and friendly, light and color and sound and memory forming the form of their bodies, a thin glimmering string of sound and light binding them, as they played in the glow inside the crèche of the Ascended, to wait to extend their handless hands to the one that linked them like a jeweled chain, until they truly were, as Primus had always decreed, one.


End file.
